Book Reviews: A Finding Guide: Introduction

Introduction to Book Review Searching

Reviews are important tools for evaluating books. Online databases have made finding book reviews quicker and easier. This brief guide lists the major resources available to Cornell users for finding book reviews. The print resources listed are available in the reference collections of Olin Library. This is not an exhaustive list of ways to find book reviews. Many disciplines have indexes that may be used to locate book reviews for that subject area (literature, history, religion, and so on). A few examples are listed here. Reference staff can guide you.

Book review indexes provide a citation to the review appearing in a newspaper, magazine, or journal. Search the newspaper, magazine, or journal title in the Cornell Library Catalog to find all the formats we own for that journal. Academic Search Premier, Amazon.com, ARBA online, Bowker's Books in Print, JSTOR, ProQuest Research Library, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers have the full text of at least some reviews (or online links to them).

The Difference between Book Reviews and Literary Criticism

The simplest criterion for distinguishing book reviews from literary criticism is the time of publication of the review/critical article compared to the original publication date of the book. Book reviews are written around the time the book was originally published; literary criticism appears in later years. For example, reviews of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that appeared in 1925 or 1926 (right after the novel was published) are book reviews, while literary criticism about the novel continues to be written today. MLA Bibliography is an important index of literary criticism. In general, the sources cited in this guide find reviews that reflect the response near the time of a book's publication.